Vacationing

As this weekend drew to a close, I felt a pang of guilt at having not worked on Rustbot at all in a week's time. Fleeting and insignificant as it was, it still precipitated a desire to proceed with the project. In all honesty, I've held no interest in continuing Rustbot all week, and I think I've identified a few factors that contributed to this developmental depression.

First and foremost would be that I worked myself silly in the month and a half preceding PAX East. I'd wager that close to ninety percent of my free time was devoted to sitting at the desk coding with my all-Rush mix tape and 2-liter of Shasta. There were many 12-hour days spent with a noticeable lack of showering and/or nutritional sustenance. Simply put, I was exhausted and pretty sick of looking at that code and gamescreen.

A second reason I identified as contributing to my lack of interest in Rustbot is frustration with bugs and general game flow (or a lack thereof). I tried for a whole staggering twenty minutes to assemble an apparatus with wheels, axles and a top cart with the intent to demonstrate the potential awesomeness of Rustbot but yet-unknown forces caused multiple crashes (without having saved my work!!) and I totally /quit.

This naturally led an overwhelming degree of doubt in the project's worth. After all, if I - the creator - could not get it to do what I wanted, how could I expect anyone else to? So much of the week was spent with me grumbling such gems to myself as "Stupid Rustbot is stupid grumble grumble" and "Nobody's even going to play it stupid Rustbot grumble grumble". All of that is clearly very productive. Clearly.

I think a third reason for the delay in work was a general resentment toward the project as having stolen all my free time and for preventing my from doing things I wanted to do, such as play games. Well yesterday (Sunday) I think I cleansed all of that out of my system by sporadically playing four different games over the course of the day. They were Call of Duty: Black Ops (still cannot get past one part; I've tried about thirty times, and NO I will not turn down the difficulty), Mechwarrior 4: Mercs, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Mass Effect 2 (finally getting around to some of the DLC, specifically Kasumi's Stolen Memory). In addition, I played the demo for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and I really enjoyed it. To that extent, I purchased it new on Amazon for a whopping $18 (along with Uncharted for $20; about time I played that widely lauded game).

Summarily, I feel somewhat refreshed and ready to tackle more aspects of Rustbot. Primarily, I need to focus not on making demo videos but instead on making things work first. To that end, I am going to implement the UI features I described in a previous post and try to make it less painful to play. In addition, I need to add the ability to remove specific joint points as well.

While I'm listing to-do features, I figure I'll throw in the "snap-to" feature, where objects will snap to a cartesian grid (center or edge) OR to other objects, making surface-to-surface interaction and joints much easier. Phew! Also, randomly spawning items for collection, inventory system (obviously losing the "add any object of any size whenever you want" capability) and related necessities.

Now that I appear to have a clear path of work (for tonight at least), I'll finish this off and get back to my day job.

/thrilled.